“I bet you’ve figured out what to do.”
He nodded again.
“And it won’t be fun, or offer good odds of success.”
A headshake. Left, then right.
Her hands dug in, wreaking a mixture of pleasure and pain, like life.
“Then tell me, husband,” she commanded, then came around to bring their faces close. “Tell me what you’ll have us do. Which way do we go?”
He exhaled a sigh. Then inhaled. And finally spoke one word.
“Up.”
7.
TOWARD THE DEADLY SKY. TOWARD VENUSIAN HELL. IT HAD to be. No other choice was possible.
“If we rise to the surface, I can try to repair the bearing from inside, without water gushing through. And if it requires outside work, then I can do that by putting on a helmet and coveralls. Perhaps they’ll keep out the poisons long enough.”
Petri shuddered at the thought. “Let us hope that won’t be necessary.”
“Yeah. Though while I’m there I could also fix the ballast straps holding some of the weight stones to our keel. I … just don’t see any other way.”
Petri sat on a crate opposite Jonah, mulling it over.
“Wasn’t upward motion what destroyed Leininger Colony and the Pride?”
“Yes … but their ascent was uncontrolled. Rapid and chaotic. We’ll rise slowly, reducing cabin air pressure in pace with the decreased push of water outside. We have to go slow, anyway, or the gas that’s dissolved in our blood will boil and kill us. Slow and gentle. That’s the way.”
She smiled. “You know all the right things to say to a virgin.”
Jonah felt his face go red. He was relieved when Petri got serious again.
“If we rise slowly, won’t there be another problem? Won’t we run out of breathable air?”
He nodded. “Activity must be kept to a minimum. Recycle and shift stale air into bottles, exchanging with the good air they now contain. Also, I have a spark separator.”
“You do? How did … aren’t they rare and expensive?”
“I made this one myself. Well, Panalina showed me how to use pinyon crystals and electric current to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. We’ll put some passengers to work, taking turns at the spin generator.” And he warned her. “It’s a small unit. It may not produce enough.”
“Well, no sense putting things off, then,” Petri said with a grandmother’s tone of decisiveness. “Give your orders, man.”
The ascent was grueling. Adults and larger teens took turns at the pumps expelling enough ballast water for the sub to start rising at a good pace … then correcting when it seemed too quick. Jonah kept close track of gauges revealing compression both inside and beyond the shells. He also watched for symptoms of decompression sickness—another factor keeping things slow. All passengers not on shift were encouraged to sleep—difficult enough when the youngest children kept crying over the pain in their ears. Jonah taught them all how to yawn or pinch their noses to equalize pressure, though his explanations kept being punctuated by fits of sneezing.
Above all, even while resting, they all had to breathe deep as their lungs gradually purged and expelled excess gas from their bloodstreams.
Meanwhile, the forechamber resonated with a constant background whine as older kids took turns at the spark separator, turning its crank so that small amounts of seawater divided into component elements—one of them breathable. The device had to be working—a layer of salt gathered in the brine collector. Still, Jonah worried. Did I attach the poles right? Might I be filling the storage bottle with oxygen and letting hydrogen into the cabin? Filling the sub with an explosive mix that could put us out of our misery at any second?
He wasn’t sure how to tell—none of his books said—though he recalled vaguely that hydrogen had no odor.
After following him on his rounds, inspecting everything and repeating his explanations several times, Petri felt confident enough to insist, “You must rest now, Jonah. I will continue to monitor our rate of ascent and make minor adjustments. Right now, I want you to close your eyes.”
When he tried to protest, she insisted, with a little more of the accented tone used by Laussane mothers. “We will need you far more in a while. You’ll require all your powers near the end. So lie down and recharge yourself. I promise to call if anything much changes.”
Accepting her reasoning, he obeyed by curling up on a couple of grain sacks that Xerish brought forward to the control cabin. Jonah’s eyelids shut, gratefully. The brain, however, was another matter.
How deep are we now?
It prompted an even bigger question: how deep is the bottom of Cleopatra Canyon nowadays?
According to lore, the first colonists used to care a lot about measuring the thickness of Venusian seas, back when some surface light used to penetrate all the way to the ocean floor. They would launch balloons attached to huge coils of string, in order to both judge depth and sample beyond the therm-o-cline barrier and even from the hot, deadly sky. Those practices died out—though Jonah had seen one of the giant capstan reels once, during a visit to Chown Dome, gathering dust and moldering in a swampy corner.
The way Earth denizens viewed their planet’s hellish interior, that was how Cleo dwellers thought of the realm above. Though there had been exceptions. Rumors held that Melvil, that legendary rascal, upon returning from his discovery of Theodora Canyon, had demanded support to start exploring the great heights. Possibly even the barrier zone, where living things thronged and might be caught for food. Of course, he was quite mad—though boys still whispered about him in hushed tones.
How many comets? Jonah found himself wondering. Only one book in Tairee spoke of the great Venus Terraforming Project that predated the Coss invasion. Mighty robots, as patient as gods, gathered iceballs at the farthest fringe of the solar system and sent them plummeting from that unimaginably distant realm to strike this planet—several each day, always at the same angle and position—both speeding the world’s rotation and drenching its long-parched basins. If each comet was several kilometers in diameter … how thick an ocean might spread across an entire globe, in twenty generations of grandmothers?
For every one that struck, five others were aimed to skim close by, tearing through the dense, clotted atmosphere of Venus, dragging some of it away before plunging to the sun. The scale of such an enterprise was stunning, beyond belief. So much so that Jonah truly doubted he could be of the same species that did such things. Petri, maybe. She could be that smart. Not me.
How were such a people ever conquered?
The roil of his drifting mind moved onward to might-have-beens. If not for that misguided comet—striking six hours late to wreak havoc near the canyon colonies—Jonah and his bride would by now have settled into a small Laussane cottage, getting to know each other in more traditional ways. Despite, or perhaps because of the emergency, he actually felt far more the husband of a vividly real person than he would have in that other reality, where physical intimacy might have happened … Still, the lumpy grain sacks made part of him yearn for her in ways that—now—might never come to pass. That world would have been better … one where the pinyon vines waved their bright leaves gently overhead. Where he might show her tricks of climbing vines, then swing from branch to branch, carrying her in his arms while the wind of flying passage ruffled their hair—
A twang sound vibrated the cabin, like some mighty cord coming apart. The sub throbbed and Jonah felt it roll a bit.
His eyes opened and he realized I was asleep. Moreover, his head now rested on Petri’s lap. Her hand had been the breeze in his hair.